Contact centers are an important component used by businesses to maintain their relationships with customers. Contact centers were originally known as “call centers” since they enabled customers to communicate with customer service agents (also known as customer service representatives, CSRs, agents, reps, etc.) through in-bound or out-bound phone calls. With the introduction of other communication channels (such as email, fax, web chat, etc.), the term “contact centers” is now used since customers are not limited only to telephone calls as a point of contact. Throughout this document, the term call centers and contact centers will be used interchangeably. For ease of discussion, much of this document will explain agent performance platforms in terms of agents interacting with customers over the phone. Embodiments of the present invention are not limited only to telephone calls and call centers. Rather, embodiments of the present invention are applicable to all channels of communication handled by contact centers, including channels in use now as well as those channels developed in the future.
Contact centers are everywhere. In 2002, there were an estimated 65,000 contact centers in America, employing almost 7 million customer service agents. Such a large number of agents are employed because call centers are accessed heavily by customers. For example, each day one national bank receives 10,000 customer inquiries through its contact centers. Experts believe the use of contact centers will grow. As an indicator of estimated growth, one business advisory firm estimates that the market (worldwide) for technology components used to build contact centers totaled $4.1 billion in 2002 and may grow to $5.5 billion by the year 2007.
In the early days of call centers, a bank of agents waited at their phones and answered calls in a round-robin fashion; the first call of the shift would be answered by the first agent, the second call would be answered by the second agent, etc. A customer could not direct his or her call to a customer support agent who specialized in the customer's type of problem. Conversely, agents received all types of calls—from the elementary question to the most challenging problem. Newer agents faced too many calls that they could not resolve and expert agents could be bored by answering too many easy problems.
The routing of calls became a matter of increased importance to optimize the efficiency of a contact center. Since labor costs could represent upwards of 70% of a contact center's costs, efficient use of labor began to have a major bearing on a contact center's competitiveness. Contact centers sought means to direct each call to the best skilled agent who was available to take the customer's call to minimize “talk time” and to maximize agent productivity. Effective call routing helped to contain labor costs as well as to optimize a customer's experience resulting in higher customer satisfaction.
As contact centers became more robust, advanced switches were implemented to manage the incoming customer requests and to assign them to an agent based on a database of routing instructions. Agents were divided into a small number of groups. For example, one group might contain Spanish-speaking agents while a second group might contain agents to answer billing questions. A third group might contain agents to handle new accounts. Once the groups were assigned, a customer could be directed to the group that best matched his or her type of call.
Present-day contact centers offer more differentiation of calls, emails, web chats and the like. Agents are no longer limited to being a member of just one of a small number of groups—such as a sales group or a billing group. Now agents can be identified by a number of skills and abilities. For example, one agent can be known to have the skills of: Spanish-speaking, advanced hardware issues, intermediate software issues, mid-west region. In some systems, ratings for up to 20 skills (also known as capabilities) can be stored for each agent, with each skill having an associated rating (such as beginner, intermediate, or advanced). Other systems track more or fewer skills and allow different types of ratings.
In present-day contact centers, automated systems first identify the customer's need by use of telephone touchpad choices, parsing of keywords in a message, and/or retrieving information about the customer via caller-ID, account number, etc. The systems then quickly match agents having skills particularly suited to the customer's need and then the best-fit agent (based on skills, availability, etc.) is chosen. Of course, if an agent's skill profile is not accurately maintained or kept up-to-date, then the switching system cannot optimize agent productivity. Instead, customer calls will be matched to agents based on their outdated skill sets. Thus it is important for the information about an agent to be accurate and current.
Many of the current switching systems (either the ACD system or the CTI application) have an interface that is used by one or more agent supervisors or administrative personnel. Whenever an agent completes training or demonstrates a different level of skill, the supervisor must use the interface to update the agent's information. Inevitably, in a contact center with large numbers of agents, it is difficult for call center supervisors to manually maintain agent skill information and to keep the information up-to-date. The task of updating skills can be overly onerous or just not important enough for a supervisor to do as soon as a new skill is developed. Instead, the supervisor may wait weeks or months before changing an agent's ratings for his or her skills. During that time, the switching systems may route calls to agents not properly suited to handle the calls resulting in poorer agent productivity and reduced customer satisfaction.
Additionally, maintenance of skill-impacting information typically falls under the purview of multiple resources in the contact center operation. Training supervisors may be responsible for updating training systems to reflect course completion. A quality monitoring team may input monitoring results. Customer satisfaction assessments may be reviewed by supervisors, who also obtain insight into agent skill development by walking the floors of the contact center. Input from each of these individuals must find its way, whether haphazardly or in a coordinated fashion, to the routing/skill table administrator who can actually change skills and ratings in the routing tool.